


like snowflakes softly falling

by earlymorningechoes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-23
Updated: 2015-05-23
Packaged: 2018-03-31 22:01:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3994477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlymorningechoes/pseuds/earlymorningechoes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You need the small things, out in the vastness of the Furthest Ring.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like snowflakes softly falling

     She isn’t sure how old she is.

     She thinks sixteen (Dave thinks sixteen, and if he’s sixteen so is she), but sometimes she thinks seventeen, and she’s no longer sure how long they’ve been on this meteor. She counted days at first, but lost count somewhere in the five hundreds, and now they’ve been here maybe two years or maybe five. Jade said three, but three years is a lot of time in which to forget. And lose track.

     She stares at the ceiling, wondering again what it will be like to meet up again in this new session they’re travelling to. Jade and John will be there, and this time she’ll be able to talk to John. Like a normal person. Maybe. Because none of them are normal. That flew out the window when they were thirteen.

     She hears soft footsteps pad outside her bedroom door – at first she thinks it’s Kanaya, because it’s always Kanaya, but this time she realizes after a moment that it’s Dave. His room is down the hall from hers, so it makes sense, but he spends so much of his time with Karkat that she isn’t used to hearing his footsteps in the hallway.

     It’s a strangely comforting sound.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

     There isn’t any sort of regular ‘night’ or ‘day’ on the meteor, so everyone pretty much sleeps when they’re tired and is awake at any odd sort of hour. She knows that Terezi is generally awake at the same time she is, so she tends to avoid the places that Terezi tends to go more often (altogether too many stuffed dragon babies floating around). But tonight she wants windows, and the best ones (where you can still sometimes see the Green Sun) are where Terezi likes to be.

     But when she arrives, she finds herself blissfully alone. The other, smaller meteors whizzing past outside kind of look like stars if she squints hard enough, and out by the windows it’s cold. Ish.

     She’s decided today – tonight – is her birthday. She’s going to claim that today is her seventeenth birthday, and no one can take that away from her, because who even cares at this point? She’s going to pretend she’s of age in some world ( _thanks, JK Rowling_ , she thinks darkly), because why not?

     “Happy birthday to me,” she begins, voice strong. But she begins to lose steam right away, falling first to a whisper and then her voice cracks.

     “Happy birthday, dear Rosie,” is all she can get through because tears start sliding down her cheeks. She pounds her fist on the window sill – Rose Lalonde does not cry. But she can’t stop, can’t bring herself to wipe away the tears as they streak over her face.

     Because even if it wasn’t a great life before, it was a life. And suddenly she misses her mother, wants someone to call Mom (that isn’t a fifteen-year-old fantasy), wants to leave twelve cents on the fridge for stealing a green W magnet that no one actually cared about.

     She sinks to the floor, staring out the windows to see Skaia spinning on its axis. “Happy birthday to me,” she finishes.


End file.
